Posted by
John Caile on Monday, January 12, 2009 5:43:35 PM
Every where you look, the affects of the economic downturn are obvious
- layoffs, cuts in wages and benefits, store and factory closings, families reevaluating their budgets to determine where they can make cuts. But, hey, in such hard times everyone has to "cut back" -
don't they?
Well, not exactly everyone.
If you are a State or Federal Government worker, not only can you be
relatively certain that you won't lose your job, you probably won't
even be denied your "guaranteed" raises.
But why? If private sector workers at every level are having to do with
less, why should government (and by extension, government workers) be
exempt from the pain?
The obvious answer is that they shouldn't. After all, every penny of
a government worker's paycheck comes from those of us who work in the
private sector - it only makes sense that during a downturn the burden be shared equally. But it's not.
The problem is rooted in two areas. First, the bureaucratic mindset
that permeates the halls of government - NOTHING must interfere with
MAINTAINING and GROWING the bureaucracy. They put on elaborate charades
that make it APPEAR they are "cutting back" - but it's usually little
more than that.
Bureaucratic chicanery works like this - suppose you are a high-level manager at a
Government agency here in Minnesota. Faced with demands to
reduce "headcount" you lay off a
small number of people...only to immediately rehire them as "temporary"
workers the very next day!
You get away with it because, thanks to the rather weird rules and regulations common to most governmental bodies, such workers are not included in
the "permanent" head count, and voila! - a "staff reduction" is magically
achieved - with no real reduction in staff! They never even have to clean out
their desks! Worse - a year later these "temporary" workers' contracts get renewed - with a raise!
The second problem is simply this: every government program has a whole army of workers administering it. And the vast majority of government
workers are union members who vote for Democrats, and whose union
contracts are negotiated by union officials who donate heavily to Democrats. Note that the heavily Democratic metropolitan areas around the country also have the highest concentrations of social welfare programs - and the government workers who run them. Thus no elected Democrat wants to anger a built-in voting bloc by voting to eliminate their jobs.
Sad to say, especially in the past 10 years, Republicans
have become nearly as bad - attempting to buy votes from the public
sector union members by throwing as much money at them as Democrats do, sometimes even more. Not surprisingly, all they succeeded in doing was to increase the number of government workers - who promptly turned around and voted Democrat.
This is why, whenever government tax revenues fall (as
they inevitably do in an economic downturn), their solution is NEVER to do
as the rest of us do: reduce expenditures. Oh, no. Almost invariably,
some official will imperiously announce that they will be "forced" to -
you guessed it - raise taxes.
And when they DO actually talk about "cutting back" have you noticed the
reductions NEVER target the enormous "entitlement" programs that make up the biggest portion of both State and Federal budgets? Ditto the countless (and generally useless)
social programs, and numerous public services and projects that no one really NEEDS
(i.e. that new "community center" that will be used to show "global warming"
movies to your kids).
No, whenever actual cuts are announced, you can
be sure they will start with:
Police. Firefighters. Emergency Responders. Well, you get the picture.
So, you feel guilty, you suck it up, roll over, and agree to...yet another tax increase. And the cycle begins all over again.
And it will continue until those of us who are paying all of the bills
DEMAND that government do what every one of US has to do: make the hard
choices and CUT spending. And by that I do not mean a "reduction in the
rate of growth" - I mean genuine CUTS.
Because there is simply no reason to continue giving government workers a free pass during tough economic times.